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24 July 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Has Amazon decided it’s time to start making a profit?

The company has raised prices for small-press books and introduced delivery fees.

By Alex Hern

Amazon has reinstated delivery charges on orders worth less than £10, signalling a renewed attention to profit margins at the company. The change won’t affect books, films, music, video games and software, which between them are the vast majority of the goods the company sells; but it means if you use the site to buy cheap electronics or household goods, you’ll soon be hit by delivery charges again.

For the last four years, all orders fulfilled by Amazon have had free shipping provided the customer was prepared to wait up to five days, but before that, the site had a threshold to qualify for its “super saver delivery”. That threshold progressively declined from £25 in the years leading up to its abolition. At the same time, the company introduced its Amazon Prime service, which gave unlimited next-day delivery for a flat charge of £49 a year.

Reinstating delivery charges, even in such a limited way, suggests that the company is backing away from its strategy of loss-leaders and revenue growth above all else. The absence of delivery charges makes sense in the context of a company which wants to dominate all shopping, because it’s important to establish in customers’ minds that they can buy any good at all. But at some point, Amazon may wish to focus on sales which make it money. That’s hardly an outrageous proposition for most companies, but it’s very different from how they’ve behaved up until now.

This isn’t the first indication of such a change in the company’s strategy. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that small publishers were seeing increases in the sale price of their books on Amazon. David Streitfeld wrote:

Other writers and publishers have the same complaint. They say Amazon, which became the biggest force in bookselling by discounting so heavily it often lost money, has been cutting back its deals for scholarly and small-press books. That creates the uneasy prospect of a two-tier system where some books are priced beyond an audience’s reach.

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Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and independent presses, said he recently surveyed 18 publishers. “Fourteen responded and said that Amazon had over the last few years either lowered discounts on scholarly books or, in the case of older or slow-selling titles, completely eliminated them,” he said.

When the University of Nebraska Press brought out a bibliography of the novelist Jim Harrison four years ago, Amazon charged $43.87. The price this week: $59.87.

Does the company feel like it has grown enough, and is now ready to start making some profit? Or does it perhaps think instead that the competition has been sufficiently cowed that customers now have nowhere else to go?

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